Earlier this week it was announced that Bryan Singer had signed onto a big screen adaptation of Battlestar Galactica, but it appears that’s not the only movie he’s now got in the works, as Variety is reporting that Warner Bros has signed a deal with Singer to produce and develop a remake of the Arthurian flick, Excalibur, with the Superman Returns filmmaker also possibly directing.
Excalbur is due to be made through Legendary Pictures (who were also behind The Dark Knight), and will once more take us back into Thomas Mallory’s quintessential King Arthur tale of myth and magic, which previously became John Boorman’s 1981 cult classic.
However Singer isn’t planning to get cameras rolling on the film particularly soon, as Variety is saying his next directing project is likely to be Jack The Giant Killer, a take on Jack And The Beanstalk that will see a young farmer heading off to the land of the giants in order to save a kidnapped princess.
He’s also said to still be eyeing a return to the X-Men franchise. While he passed on directing both X-Men 3 and Wolverine, he’s said to be interested in X-Men: First Class, which is being written by OC creator Josh Schwartz, about a band of young mutants (probably the ones we saw Professor Xavier save in Wolverine). However with his regular collaborator, Christopher MacQuarrie (Usual Suspects, Valkyire), now writing Wolverine 2, many have speculated that Fox is hoping to lure Singer back for that movie.
However, as Singer has a history of developing films and then leaving them, we won’t believe he’s making any of these films until cameras start rolling.
It also makes us wonder what all this means for the Warren Ellis scripted King Arthur movie being developed by 300 production company, Hollywood Gang. They previously worked with Legendary on 300, but there’s no news on whether the Singer movie is the same one that Ellis has said was described by Hollywood Gang as Excalibur, while he wanted to call it something else. However if they are different films, it’s the Singer one that Warner has been busily signing up all the film rights for, with Variety saying this version doesn’t currently have a writer. Ellis could be writing a completely separate film in the same vein as Excalibur, but if so, it’s likely to be left in in the cold by Warner’s announcement of an official remake.